mr. perdue: mr. president? the presiding officer: the senator from georgia. mr. perdue: i know we have a vote coming up. i would like permission to complete my remarks. the presiding officer: without objection. mr. perdue: mr. president, i rise today to discuss why i believe the senate should not hold hearings or schedule a vote on any supreme court nominee offered by president obama until the american people choose our next president this november. the american people are reacting to our global security and debt crises when they go to the polls. in this upcoming election, we'll not only determine the election of our country, but it also serves as a referendum on the presidency, congress and the supreme court balance. the last seven years has shown that this president has sought to ex-speed the constitutional bounds of the executive office by assuming powers delegated to this body. in january of 2013, the president attempted to recess-appoint nominees to the nlrb in direct violation of the senate's will. the supreme court later intervened and struck down those app

mr. perdue: and interlocked with that global security crisis is our own federal debt crisis, which todayiability -- very ability to fund our military and defend our country. today, after we spend all of our tax revenue on mandatory expenses like social security and medicare and those are all necessary, but after we spend all of that, there's nothing left. every dime that is spent on foreign aid, every dime that's spent on our military is borrowed. ladies and gentlemen, we are indeed at a moment of crisis in america. how did we get here? and what do we do about it? well, in the last 100 years, we've had three democratic supermajorities. the first gave us the new deal. the second gave us the great society. the third, obamacare and dodd-frank. i'm just a business guy but i would argue that most of the responsibility for this financial catastrophe can be laid at the feet of those three supermajorities. and yet the irony is that the very people that they claim to champion, the working middle class and working poor, they have failed them. today, for example, poverty is exactly the same as it w

mr. chairman. thank you for being here, once again. i appreciate senator perdue's conversation about what we can afford to do within the limited resources we have to spend. listen, i would pose the opposite question. i think we have to ask our question, how we can afford not to make these investments, especially when you put u.s. foreign aid, international development funding in the context of what our competitor nations are spending themselves. over the last ten years alone, the chinese have increased their foreign aid by a factor of seven at a time when our foreign aid has been largely flat. we are looking at a budget that is frankly $2 billion less than fy-'10 enacted numbers. the chinese have increased their spending by a factor of seven. in egypt, a lot of commotion about turning on $2.3 billion in u.s. military aid. the saudis announced $8 billion play with money both from their public funds and their sovereign funds, a $20 billion oil investment in egypt, and we sit here and wonder why we don't have as much influence there as other countries. it's in part be

senator perdue, the congressman from texas, everybody else laid out what we need to do, why we need to keep majorities in the u.s. house and senate. mr. till liss: i want to talk about the -- mr. tillis: i want to talk about the thing i've enjoined most about being a u.s. senator the last year. i've traveled around the globe. i've been to baghdad, afghanistan a forward operating base outside of kabul, in kabul. i've been in indonesia. i've been all over the world. i had somebody ask me, what's the furthest distance you've traveled from the united states since you've been a u.s. senator? i said, the white house. i have not seen a president take this country in a direction that is so far afield of where the american people want to go. pick a subject, regulation, taxes, states' rights, property rights, pick a subject. it doesn't bear any resemblance to the america i grew up in. i'm a reagan republican. i registered in 1978 as a republican. i got to see a turn around from principled republican leadership in the white house. i saw this country going from the depths with iran doing whatever they wanted to -- are we not living 1978 again? w

mr. perdue: thank you, madam president. regarding the vacancy on the supreme court, many of our colleagues in the minority party have said the same things that we're saying today. let's stop kidding each other. this kind of political show man showmanship and yes indeed hypocrisy is exactly what makes everyone in my home state absolutely apoplectic with washington. the last time i addressed the supreme court vacancy on the senate floor, i urged my colleagues on the other side of the aisle not to let the nominations process get bogged down in partisan politics. that's not what this should be about. not to let this process turn into political theater, because that's exactly what's happened far too often in this body ever since the bork nomination way back in 1987. the organized campaign of vilification and character attacks surrounding judge bork's nomination was so unprecedented and so extreme that it took the creation of a new word, the verb to bork to describe what had happened. the process for nominating justices to the su